American clergyman (1813-1887)
Amid the discords of this life, it is blessed to think of heaven, where God draws after him an everlasting train of music; for all thoughts are harmonious and all feelings vocal, and so there is round about his feet eternal melody.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Sin is sweet in the mouth and bitter in digestion. It lies hard on the stomach.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Perverted pride is a great misfortune in men; but pride in its original function, for which God created it, is indispensable to a proper manhood.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Wickedness goes to great lengths and depths where it is not checked and restrained by the free and continuous expression of the indignation of good men.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Our earthly loves are but so many silver steps leading us up to the great golden love of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Faith means a sanctified imagination, or the imagination applied to spiritual things.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There are some Christians whose secular life is an arid, worldly strife, and whose religion is but a turbid sentimentalism. Their life runs along that line where the overflow of the Nile meets the desert. It is the boundary line between sand and mud.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practice it while they hear. No man can learn patience except by going out into the hurlyburly world, and taking life just as it blows. Patience is but lying to, and riding out the gale.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Well-married, a man is winged--ill-matched, he is shackled.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
A cunning man overreaches no one half so much as himself.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
One of the affecting features in a life of vice is the longing, wistful outlooks given by the wretches who struggle with unbridled passions, towards virtues which are no longer within their reach. Men in the tide of vice are sometimes like the poor creatures swept down the stream of mighty rivers, who see people safe on shore, and trees, and flowers, as they go quickly past; and all things that are desirable gleam upon them for a moment to heighten their trouble, and to aggravate their swift-coming destruction.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
Blessed be the man whose work drives him. Something must drive men; and if it is wholesome industry, they have no time for a thousand torments and temptations.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Some men think that the globe is a sponge that God puts into their hands to squeeze for their own garden or flower-pot.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Our virtues are like crystals hidden in rocks. No man shall find them by any soft ways, but by the hammer and by fire.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
This world is magnificent for strangers and pilgrims, but miserable for residents.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Newspapers are to the body politic what arteries are to the human body, their function being to carry blood and sustenance and repair to every part of the body.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Woman began at zero, and has through ages slowly unfolded and risen. Each age has protested against growth as unsexing woman.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Patriotism, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong, and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield every thing that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the state through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to him. The laws and institutions of his country ought to have been more to him than all the men in his country. They were not, and the Jews hated him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards his heavenly attraction wherever he went.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts